9, 72, 211, 220, 283, 295

Those are the num­bers of a few of the buses I some­times catch from Ham­mer­smith bus sta­tion. I just thought you’d like to know — all this incon­sequen­tial inform­a­tion can only help you in build­ing up a pic­ture of my scin­til­lat­ing daily life. It was read­ing about Meg’s sight­ing of the world’s unlike­li­est movie star at this par­tic­u­lar bus sta­tion that got me thinking.

Whether you live in Lon­don or just visit the city occa­sion­ally, if you’re the sort of per­son who some­times indulges in the pas­time of people-watching, I can’t recom­mend Ham­mer­smith bus ter­minus highly enough. Maybe it’s the open and spa­cious design, maybe it’s just the simple fact that so many bus routes con­verge on that strange island set adrift in the middle of the sur­round­ing vehicle round­about — but in that one loc­a­tion there is always at least one inter­est­ing per­son whom I can’t help gaz­ing at out of the corner of my eye.

Fri­day even­ings seem to be the high­light of the week at the ter­minus. The kids pour out of school and rush to exper­i­ence the high speed thrills and spills of — er, um — the escal­at­ors, the lifts and the Tesco Metro store. If you’re really lucky, you can play at avoid­ing being mown down by one of them as they zoom around on rollerblades. I’m sure they shouldn’t be allowed to do that, should they? Bus sta­tions to hang around in, eh? Kids today — they don’t know they’re born. In my day, we had to make do with a simple metal and glass bus shel­ter — not a huge bus ter­minus com­plete with nearby super­mar­ket, cof­fee bar and pub. And as I lived in the coun­tryside, there were pre­cious few buses any­way. We had to make our own enter­tain­ment. Et cet­era, et cetera.

I haven’t seen him recently, but last year I would often catch sight of a former tele­vi­sion celebrity sway­ing drunk­enly around the place, car­ry­ing a bottle of some cheap uniden­ti­fi­able alco­hol and occa­sion­ally slump­ing onto a bench. If any­one remem­bers the short-lived char­ac­ter of Felix the barber from East­Enders, played by Harry Landis, then you’ll know who I’m talk­ing about. Harry always looked like he was about to say some­thing — at any moment, I expec­ted him to grab a passer-by and slur at them, “I used to be someone, y’know. I was in the country’s most pop­u­lar TV soap. What, don’t you remem­ber me? Y’know — Felix? Felix the barber? Felix?” He never did, though. He just quietly got on with his own slightly tipsy form of people-watching. I never saw him catch a bus.

In fact, I have a the­ory that many people never catch a bus at Ham­mer­smith. They just come to sit, watch a few buses pass by, eat a sand­wich (sandwich-eating is a very pop­u­lar pas­time there), check out all the dif­fer­ent faces of Lon­don life, and then go home again. All human life is there.